But before you can land a corporate role with the online retail behemoth, you have to tick three particular boxes in the minds of the hiring managers and executives vetting you.

At least, that’s the process CEO Jeff Bezos recommended to his team 20 years ago. In a 1998 letter to shareholders, customers, and employees, Bezos described his 2,100 employees as “smart, hard-working, passionate folks who put customers first” and credited “setting the bar high in our approach to hiring” for the team’s strength.

He added that hiring policies and practices would be “the single most important element” in ensuring Amazon’s continued success.

To identify standout candidates, Bezos told executives to mull over three questions before extending a job offer:

1. “Will you admire this person?”

Bezos wrote that “life is definitely too short” to work with colleagues you don’t admire.

“For myself, I’ve always tried hard to work only with people I admire, and I encourage folks here to be just as demanding,” Bezos wrote.

Before founding Amazon, Bezos worked at the startup Fitel, the former banking institution Bankers Trust, and the hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. (Business Insider’s Shana Lebowitz reported that Bezos actually based Amazon’s hiring process on his experience at D.E. Shaw.)

In 1998, he encouraged his team to compare candidates to people they admired in their own lives.

2. “Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering?”

3. “Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?”

In 1998, he revealed that he also likes to work with unique people, writing that it’s important to hire candidates with “unique skills, interests, and perspectives that enrich the work environment for all of us,” regardless of whether those traits are “related to their jobs.”

Bezos gave a shoutout to an unnamed Amazon employee who he said was once a National Spelling Bee champion.

He speculated that the person won the 1978 championship, but it was most likely Barrie Trinkle, who won the 1973 competition and worked for Amazon from 1996 to 2001.

“I suspect it doesn’t help her in her everyday work, but it does make working here more fun if you can occasionally snag her in the hall with a quick challenge: ‘onomatopoeia!'” Bezos wrote.